What’s a backlink? A backlink (otherwise known as an incoming link) occurs when another person’s site links to yours. If you’re trying to figure out the meaning of backlinks, you have no doubt done some research about getting traffic to your website and seen how important having backlinks is to generating traffic.

It works like this. . .first, you build a website. Hopefully you’ve created your website the right way by using the right structure and keywords so that your site is on the right path to being search engine optimized. If you use the right SEO (search engine optimization) strategies, you will come up high in search engine ranking.

This means that when someone goes into a search engine to look for something that your business offers, you will come up on the first page of the search engine results (rather than your competitor). So, search engine optimization is important and you need to keep it in mind as you are creating your website.

Now we get more into the specific answer to "What’s a backlink". While the structure and keywords are important to keep in mind as you create and add to your website, the most important factor of good SEO for the rest of your website’s life is adding and maintaining backlinks. The reason is simple.

The search engines use backlinks to rate how worthwhile or valuable your site is. If you have many others linking to your site, that signifies to the search engines that you have a reputable site that is worth displaying high in the results. So you move up in rank. While the quantity of the backlinks contributes to your ranking, it is also important to make sure that you maintain high backlink quality as well. Try to avoid having backlinks from sites that have nothing to do with your site. Also, it is better to have backlinks coming from other highly ranked sites (as long as they are related to yours).

There are many ways to go about building backlinks. You can hire a service to do it for you, but just make sure that you do the research to insure that you will be getting enough high quality links for what you spend. You can also do this yourself. It is quite time consuming and can be frustrating, but it is crucial to the ranking of your site.

If you decide to go about link-building yourself, you can manually request others to link to you, you can submit your site manually to the most reputable directories, you can submit articles that link back to your site to the many article directories, and you can participate in forums and other social media platforms so that people are constantly clicking on your link. These are just a few of the many ways that you can go about increasing the number of backlinks to your site. Now that you have the basic answer to "What’s a backlink?, it’s time to start adding them to your internet marketing strategy.